Ship of Fools

"Sorry, but rules are rules," said the one with the
leather bag. I nodded. He gently peeled the watch off my
wrist and laid it over the ship's railing. Crunch: the
hammer rebounded. He scooped what was left back into the
bag, careful not to drop any glass fragments on the deck.

They looked at each other and shrugged. The one with the
bag looked a little guilty. "Here, you can borrow mine,"
he said, offering it to me.

"Thanks." I tightened the strap, then carried on up the
gangway. It was an old Rolex Oyster, case tarnished with
decades of sweat. I glanced back. The hammer team waited
patiently for their next target. The one with the hammer
was wearing a red T-shirt with a logo on its back. I
squinted closer at the marketing slogan:

UNIX - THE TIME IS RIGHT.

Rita was already in the fore-deck lounge when I got
there. I had half expected her not to show up, but we'd
booked the tickets five years ago, three years before the
divorce, and her name hadn't disappeared from the roster
since then. I suppose I'd assumed she'd forget, or
dismiss it, or not think it worth bothering with. I
waited for the usual cold shudder of unnameable emotions
to pass, then headed for the bar.

Polished brass and wood gleamed in the gas-light like an
old-fashioned pub. (The overhead electrics were powered
down, except for the red glare of an emergency light's
battery charge indicator.) One guy was already sitting on
a bar stool, elbow-propped above his beer glass. I looked
at him for a moment before I blinked and realized that it
was the Professor. A blast from the past; he'd retired
two years ago. I sat down on the stool next to him. There
was nobody behind the bar, but I figured a steward would
be along shortly.

"Marcus Jackman ... isn't it?" he asked, glancing round
at me. Time hadn't been kind to him; burst blood vessels
streaked the tip of his nose and his eyes looked sore.

"Eight years and counting," I said. "What are you
drinking?"

He glanced at the row of optics behind the bar: "Perrier
for now, I think." He yawned. "Sorry, I haven't had much
sleep lately."

"Anything in particular?" I asked.

"The usual," he said. "The chancellor put a gagging order
on me, can you believe it? Said what I was saying was bad
for the institute's public image. So I packed my bags and
came here instead. Olaf said he'd keep a berth open for
me but I didn't think I'd be taking him up on it until
... oh, a month ago. If that."

I shook my head. A barman appeared silently: I tipped him
the wink and he refilled the Professor's tumbler from the
fizzy water tap. I asked for and received a double gin
and tonic. I felt I needed it. "They wouldn't listen to
you?" I asked.

The Professor shook his head. "Nothing ever changes at
the top," he said sadly. "So what did you make of
yourself?"

"I run a big switch site. Loads of bandwidth. Nothing
that's going to be hit by the event -- at least, not
directly. But still, I don't trust my bank account, I
don't trust the tax system ... there's too much
brittleness. Everywhere I look. Maybe I've just been
tracking risks for too long, and then again ..."

"You made a down payment on this holiday three or four
years ago, eh?"

I nodded.

"They wouldn't listen to me," he muttered. "I kept on for
as long as was reasonable, even though they told me it
was a career-limiting move -- as if some little thing
like tenure would stop them -- until I was too tired to
go on."

"I get to see a lot, out in the real world," I
volunteered. "That standard lecture piece you did, on the
old reactor control system -- I've seen worse."

"Oh yes?" He showed a flicker of interest, so I
continued.

"A big corporate accounting system. Used to run on a
bundle of mainframes at six different national
headquarters, talking via leased line. Want to hear about
it?"

"Pray continue." I had his attention.

"They downsized everything they could, but there were
about fifty million lines of PL/I on the accounts system.
Nobody could be bothered to bring it up to date -- it had
taken about two hundred programmers twenty years to put
it all together. Besides which, they were scared of the
security implications of reverse-engineering the whole
thing and sticking it on modern networked machines. In
the end, they hit a compromise: there was this old VM/CMS
emulator for DOS PC's floating around. They bought six
stupidly powerful workstations running something a bit
more modern. Stuck a DOS emulator on each workstation,
and ran their accounting suite under the VM/CMS emulator
under the DOS emulator --"

I waited while his spluttering subsided into a chuckle.
"I think that deserves another drink: don't you?"

I took a big gulp from my G&T and nodded. "Yeah." More
fizzy water for the Prof. "Anyway. These six, uh,
mainframes, had to talk to each other at something
ridiculous like 1200 baud. So the droids who implemented
this piece of nonsense hired a hacker, who crufted them
up something that looked like a 1200 baud serial line to
the VM/CMS emulator, but which actually tunneled packets
through the internet, from one workstation to another.
Only it ran under DOS, `cause of the extra level of
emulation. Then they figured they ought to let the data
entry clerks log in through virtual terminals so they
could hire teleworkers from India instead of paying guys
in suits from Berkhampstead, so they wrote a tty driver
just for the weird virtual punched-card reader or
whatever the bloody accounting system thought it was
working with."

Someone tapped me on my shoulder. I glanced round.

"Yo, dude! Gimme five!"

"Six," I said. Clive beamed at me. "Been here long?"

"Just arrived," he said. "I knew I'd find you propping up
the bar. Hey, did the guys on the gangway give you any
aggro?"

"Not much." I put my hand over my watch's face. The whole
thing disturbed me more than I wanted to think about, and
Rita's silent presence (reading a book in a deep
leather-lined chair at the far side of the room) didn't
contribute anything good to my peace of mind. "I was just
telling the professor about --"

"The mainframes." The professor nodded. "Most
interesting. Can I trouble you to tell me what happened
in the end? I hate an interrupted tale."

I shrugged. "Drink for my man here," I said.

"Make mine a pint," said Clive.

"In a nutshell," said the professor.

"In a nutshell: they'd put it all in an emulator, and
handled all the logins via the net, so some bright spark
suggested they run six emulators in parallel on one box
and use local domain sockets to emulate the serial lines.
It looked like it would save about fifty thousand bucks,
and they'd already spent a quarter million on the port --
as opposed to eighty, ninety million for a proper
re-write -- so they did it. Put everything in one box."

"And what happened?" asked Clive.

Well, they stuffed the old corporate accounting system
into a single workstation. You've got to understand, it
was about fifty times as powerful as all six mainframes
put together. The old mainframes were laid off about two
months after the emulator went live, to save on the
maintenance bill. So they moved office six months after
that, and they managed to lose the box in the process.
The inventory tag just went missing; it was so
unobtrusive it looked like every other high-end server in
the place. By the time they found it again, some droid
from the marketing department who though Christmas had
come early had reformatted its root partition and
installed a multi-user game server on it ..."

"Man, that's bad," said Clive. He looked improperly
cheerful.

"Yes." The professor looked worried. "That almost tops
the reactor story." He drained his glass then
absent-mindedly checked the dosimeter he kept clipped to
the breast pocket of his sports jacket: "but not quite."

Unscheduled Criticality Excursion -- (
jargon) term used in the nuclear engineering
industry to refer to the simultaneous catastrophic
failure of all of a fission reactor's safety features,
resulting in a runaway loss of coolant accident. (
Formerly: melt-down.)

The ship set sail three hours later. I was already
adrift, three sheets to the wind, and Clive steered me
out on deck to watch the pier drift astern.

"Feel that breeze," he said, and leaned out over the
railing until I worried about him falling overboard. (An
accident, so early in the voyage, would be a bad way to
start; there was plenty of time for such incidents
ahead.) "It's cool. Onshore. Loads of salt. Iodine from
decaying seaweed. Say, did you bring your iodine tablets?
Sun block? Survival rations?"

"Only what I figured we'd definitely need," I said,
slurring on my certainty. "Didn't know about Rita. Shit.
Don't need that shit. Are you okay over there?"

"Don't be silly!"

And guess who'd seen fit to join us on deck? If it wasn't
my ex. I was drunk enough to be a bit out of control and
in control enough to feel vulnerable: not, in other
words, at my best. "And whash you doing here?" I asked,
leaning against the rail beside Clive.

"Coming to ask what you're doing here," she said. "You're
a mess." There was no rancour in her voice; just a calm,
maddening self-assurance, as if she thought she'd earned
the right to know me better than I knew myself.

"Funny, I could have sworn he was an engineer," quipped
Clive.

"You used the original ticket?" I asked.

Rita leaned up against the railing a couple of metres
away from me. "I tried to exchange it," she said
guardedly. "By then, the ship was over-booked."

"Let's talk," she said. I followed her around the curve
of the deck, away from Clive. The sea was still, but even
so I had difficulty keeping my balance as it gently
rolled beneath my feet. She stopped in the shadow of a
lifeboat. "You know what this means?" she asked.

More histrionics, I thought. "It means we both just have
to be very careful," I said, emphasizing the final word.

Unexpectedly, she smiled at me. "Two years and you didn't
change your ticket!" It was not a very pretty smile.

I shrugged. "So that makes me a fool?"

She looked at me sharply: "no more than ever, Marcus. See
you later." She turned and stalked off in the direction
of the door we'd come through. I looked towards the stern
of the ship, a dark mass of shadows in the night: the
breeze became slightly chilly if I stood in one place for
long enough. I stood there for a long time.

Risks of embarking on an expensive sea voyage booked too
far in advance, number 12: having to share a cramped
cabin with a spouse who divorced you years ago.

I went to bed drunk, and when I awoke the next
morning the cabin was mine. I sat up. My neck ached as if
I'd lain too long in the wrong position; my tongue tasted
as if something small and furry had died on it far too
long ago. The cabin was a mess. My trunk was stowed
neatly beneath the lower bunk bed -- but a familiar
suitcase was open and strewn across the table, and she'd
spread her toiletries across every available surface in
the cramped bathroom.

I groaned, sat up, and hastily made for the toilet -- the
head, I remembered to call it. Today was The Eve of
Destruction; December the 31st, to the real world at
large, and we would be sailing south-east and out into
the endless blue eye of the Gulf of Mexico. Theoretically
I had booked a two week holiday from my job. As a matter
of caution -- I checked carefully in the bag full of
dirty socks in my trunk before heading for breakfast --
both small, extremely heavy bars of metal were still
there. Five thousand ecus each, they'd set me back: a
whopping great hole in my savings, but if what we were
expecting was the case, well worth it in the long run.

The dining lounge had seen better days; although this
cruise ship called itself a liner, I had my suspicions.
It reminded me of a run-down hotel, formerly a grand
palace of the leisured classes, now reduced to eking out
a living as a vendor of accomodation and conference space
to corporate sales drones on quarterly kick-off
briefings. I sat down at one of the tables and waited for
one of the overworked stewards to come over and pour me a
coffee.

"Mind if I join you?"

I looked up. It was a woman I'd met somewhere -- some
conference or other -- lanky blonde hair, palid skin, and
far too evangelical about formal methods. "Feel free."
She pulled a chair out and sat down and the steward
poured her a cup of coffee immediately. I noticed that
even on a cruise ship she was dressed in a business suit,
although it looked somewhat the worse for wear. "Coffee,
please," I called after the retreating steward.

The penny dropped. "Karla ... Carrol?" I asked. She
smiled. "Yes, I remember your review." I did indeed, and
nearly burned my tongue on the coffee trying not to let
slip precisely how I remembered it. I'm not fit
to be rude until after at least the third cup of the
morning. "Most interesting. What brings you here?"

"The usual risk contingency planning. I'm still in
catastrophe estimation, but I couldn't get anyone at work
to take this weekend seriously. So I figured, what the
hell? That was about two weeks ago."

"Two weeks --" I stopped. "How did you wangle that?"

She sipped her coffee. A lock of hair dropped across it;
she shoved it back absend-mindedly. "There's always a
certain roll-over in things like this," she said. "It
just depends who you talk to ..."

Show-off. Whoever had set up the booking system, whatever
troll from the deep, dark, underside of the ACM SIG-RISK
group, had known more than a little about queueing
theory; I'd spent two months, on and off, trying to get
Pauli aboard the lifeboat, while she'd just walked on
board. "I thought there was a waiting list," I said.

"Even lists have holes." She stared coldly at the steam
rising from her coffee cup; "and even institutional
coffee tastes better than this rubbish. I say,
waiter!"

"Why did you leave it so late, if you believe in the
rollover meltdown?" I asked, wishing she'd just let the
coffee quality issue die.

"Because it's not the meltdown I'm interested in," she
said; "ah, it's about this coffee. It's disgusting. Have
you been letting the jug stand on a hot plate for too
long? So a few legacy systems, big hierarchical database
applications for the most part, wrap around and go
nonlinear when the year increments from 99 to 00. A fair
number of batch reconcilliation jobs go down the spout at
midnight, and never get up again. Yes, some fresh arabica
will do nicelyh. Maybe even some big ones, like driver
licensing systems or the Police national computer, or the
odd merchant bank. But nothing bolted together in the
past ten years will even break wind, so to speak. Excuse
me, break stride. And real-time systems won't
even notice it; they mostly run on millisecond timers and
leave the nonsense about dates to external conversion
routines, if they understand the concept of dates at all,
thank you very much, like a Mars Rover running on mission
elapsed time in seconds. Good, much better, thank you."

The harried waiter made a break for the other diners and
I began to dig myself out of the hole in my chair I'd
unconsciously tried to retreat into.

"It's just an artefact of the datum," she continued
implacably, ignoring the coffee cut placed apologetically
before her. "You might as well have picked on the UNIX
millenium; it only runs for two to the thirty-one seconds
from midnight on January first, nineteen-seventy, then
some time thirty-two years from now the clocks begin
counting in negative numbers. Of course, not many systems
run for seventy years without maintenance, but there's
been an alarming trend lately towards embedding UNIX in
black-box applications it's totally unsuited for.
Personally, I think twenty thirty-two is a much more
realistic armageddon-type datum, for that and other
reasons."

I cringed slightly. "What brings you here, then, if you
don't think there's going to be a fairly major disaster?"

"Because this is a ship of fools," she said brightly. "I
wanted to observe and see how you're managing under
percieved stress. Not to mention that some people here
have jobs to go back to. I'm thinking of collaborating on
a paper with a sociologist from my local university on
stresss-related idiopathic delusional complexes in closed
professional bodies. Chicken Little crying `the sky is
falling', when quite simply it can't fall yet because
this is a premature software apocalypse."

I gritted my teeth and swallowed the last of my coffee.
"You're very sure that this is a false alarm."

"But it can't be the real thing! It's too early -- only
the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Our Lord
Jesus Christ. Now the two thousandth anniversary of his
Crucifixion is another matter, and the coincidence with
the UNIX millennium is another sign. But what really
clinches it is the timewave zero hypothesis advanced by
Terrance McKenna, who proved that the Aztec cyclic
history sequence actually comes to an end -- a
singularity -- in the same time scale. If you think this
is a survival trip, just wait for the next one in
thirty-two years time! The ability of humans to
anticipate an apolcalypse tends towards a maximum in line
with the proximity of big dates in their numbering
system; they unconsciously fail to plan for survival past
the next one, so disaster ensues. Now in this age of
computers I think the baseline has shifted from the
millennium to the kiloyear -- which as you know, is two
to the tenth years, or one thousand and sixteen. And St
John was quite obviously talking about access permission
bits when he said that the number of the Beast was six,
six, six. More coffee?"

I excused myself and made for the deck with all possible
haste; I could tell it was going to be one of those days.

I didn't dare to venture back into the dining
room for another hour, until I was sure Karla had
finished browbeating the staff; I wandered the upper deck
like a lost soul, staring out across the muddy green
expanse of sea, towards the gently swaying line in the
distance where green met greyish white. The weather was
poor (rather worse than I had been led to expect) and my
head still throbbed from the night before. Back in the
ops room at the institute, Marek or one of the other
admins would be sitting up with a dog-eared paperback and
a stack of blank backup cartridges, waiting patiently for
the autochanger to bleat for a new load to accomodate the
terabytes of data spooling slowly down onto tape. If I
was there I'd probably be doing a dervish whirl of
emergency disaster recovery preparations, single-handedly
preparing to hold back the deluge of user complaints due
on the first day of the new year. But I wasn't there: all
I could do was squint into the wind, face pinched in by
impotent tension, and wish I was in another line of work.

When my face turned numb I went below, back to the gently
rolling warmth of the dining room. Karla had evidently
finished; Clive waved at me from a corner so I went and
joined him. "How's the morning?" I asked.

He pulled a face. "As you'd expect. Some woman tried to
chat me up but it turned out she was recruiting for some
Church or other. I managed to get away in one piece,
though. Are you on for this evening's festivities?"

I nodded. "What's everyone doing today, then?"

"There's a seminar session on disaster recovery
techniques for large transaction-based systems in the
forward lounge on C deck. Some old salt is giving a
lecture on navigating by the stars in the bar before
lunchtime, then the Professor is giving his account of
the Sizewell `B' disaster -- the one he gave at the ACM
bash in London this year. You were there, weren't you?
Oh, and there's a bingo game somewhere or other, it's on
the noticeboard on D deck."

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

Clive put his knife down with a clatter. "I'm going to
read a book," he said. "The weather's crap and the sea's
going to get rough according to the shipping forecast.
Might as well hole up and relax a bit."

"Read a book," I echoed. "Sounds like a good idea." I
could already smell the boredom rising from the great and
borderless sea outside our hull; a boredom born of nervy
fright, knowledge of what countdown was now in progress
in the real world. Karla, for all her objectionable
manner and dubious hypotheses, had maybe had a point;
humans set their historical clocks by the stars, and the
beginning of a new millennium is no insignificant event.
Even if the real fruitcakes think the show's coming
thirty-two years later ...

Boredom: Knowing that the end of the world is due
to happen in less than eighty-one thousand seconds, but
being unable to hurry it along, impede it, or even ignore
it and do something else in the meantime.

I had brought along a book on formal design methodologies
to break my head on for the voyage, but I didn't feel
like reading it. When I returned to my cabin I found that
Rita was still elsewhere. She'd brought along a huge mass
of junk literature; disposable magazines, novels, a
two-day-old newspaper. I read the leader columns in the
paper, then the lifestyle section, then finally the job
advertisements. They were recruiting lots of corporate
drones, chief information officers: scope for a hollow
laugh at someone else's expense. But I didn't feel like
reading much, as my stomach was slightly weak from the
constant swaybacked lurching of the deck, so I lay down
on my bunk to catch the forty winks of the truly bored.

I dreamed that I was being interrogated by three
sinister, shadowy men in dark suits who kept a bright
light pointed at my eyes. They wanted to know why I had
abandoned Rita and our two-year old daughter. They didn't
seem to understand that we had never had a child, and
that Rita had left me -- not the other way around. They
said I set a dangerous, risky example to society at
large; that runaway fathers should be allowed to make off
with the taxpayers money was not a message they were
prepared to send. They were about to sentence me to --
something -- when I awakened with a panicky jolt.
Rita was leaning over me.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

I tried to croak "I think so," but nothing very
intelligible came out so I nodded instead.

"You looked as if you were having a bad dream."

"I was." I tried to sit up but she put a hand on my
shoulder and pushed me down again. "Please ..." I said.

"Lie down." I did as I was told. "Who were you with this
morning at breakfast?" she asked.

"Some fruitcake," who thinks the apocalypse is due in
thirty-two years and we're all barking up the wrong tree.
"She sat down at the same table and started trying to
convert me to baptism or whatever the hell she believes
in."

"I see." She was quiet for a moment. "Well just don't
bring her back to this cabin, you hear me? Don't you
dare." She turned away abruptly, leaving me too
dumbstruck to say anything as she stalked out of the
cabin and yanked the door shut behind her. Maybe I was a
fool to be here, but that didn't make Rita any less blind
herself.

I wandered along to a late lunch -- cold buffet only --
then an afternoon seminar on trusted anonymous systems
validation. I avoided the deck, which was subject to an
intermittent cold rain. There was due to be a banquet in
the evening; I headed back to my cabin, had a shower,
then changed into the suit I'd bought along for the
occasion.

The bar adjoining the main dining room was drawing a
steady business as twilight cast its shadow across the
ship; refugee computer professionals in various states of
formal attire held ice-cube clinking tumblers of whiskey
in tense conversational huddles, while spousal units
watched disinterestedly or discussed the foul weather. I
saw Karla Carrol, wearing a long green dress and too much
makeup, and shrank into the `L'-shaped recess at the
opposite end of the bar, where two hunchbacked mainframe
administrators were trying to top one-another's dumb user
stories. Karla seemed to have snagged an unfortunate
woman who was something big in actuarial systems, and was
talking into her ear: I ordered a double vodka and coke,
and then another before the steward ushered us into the
dining room.

To my surprise, I found myself seated next to Rita. She
seemed to be enjoying herself as long as she payed no
attention to me; as I hadn't seen her that happy since a
year before we split up, I was quite content to maintain
my reserve. Besides, the food was substantially filling
and my glass never seemed to empty, until I leaned back
in a bloated semi-stupor to listen to the Prof give his
keynote speech (after some nonentity from the organizing
committee, introduced to the limbo of my memory by one of
the ship's officers.)

The Professor staggered slightly as he took the podium.
"Friends, I am pleased to be here to speak to you
tonight, but less pleased at the necessity for this
voyage." He paused for a moment and fiddled with the
microphone. I was surprised by how little he had changed
from my perspective, even given an extra ten years of age
on my own account. He was still impressive.

"Software allows us to build huge, invisible machines --
virtual mountains so complex that nobody can really
understand the whole scope of a large application. But
software is brittle: change an underlying constraint, and
the whole edifice crumbles like a mountain hit by an
earthquake. A single fundamental assumption that changes
-- as simple as the shift from one century to the next at
the junction between two millennia -- can break just
about anything, anywhere, in the guts of such a system,
and it could take seconds or months for the damage to
surface. Back in the mid-nineties there were an estimated
two hundred and fifty billion lines of vulnerable source
code, waiting for the new century to rattle the ground
from under them; at twenty thousand lines of code per
programmer per year that would have taken a million
programmers a year to fix ... so everybody pretended it
wasn't there. Except us. Everyone here tonight has had
some role in attempting to cure the crisis of
complacency. Everyone here has been burned by the fire of
bureaucratic inertia. And so it is that everyone here
chose of their own free will to join this ship of fools
on a voyage who's motto might be, `I told you so!'"

He covered his mouth and hiccuped as discreetly as one
may in front of an audience of two hundred. I glanced
sideways at Rita; her face was a carefully controlled
mask for boredom.

"In about an hour, it will be midnight back in England.
It is already five o'clock in the morning of January
first, year two thousand, somewhere far to the east of
here. The datum is sweeping remorselessly round the dark
side of the world, leaving random malfunctions in its
wake. Some of those malfunctions are doubtless trivial;
bugs in systems long since retired. Others are naggingly
pernicious but relatively harmless matters, such as the
school districts that fall victim to collation routines
that tell them everyone above the age of one hundred and
three needs to be enrolled in a nurserey class. But one
or two ..." he stopped, and for a moment seemed bowed
down by a terrible weight: "might be serious. As serious,
perhaps, as the Sizewell disaster."

I didn't want to pursue that line of logic, and neither
(apparently) did the Prof. What happened at Sizewell
happened because nobody understood the entire system, and
nobody subjected it to formal proof: nor did they look
into some of the more obscure race conditions that could
arise if different subsystems found themselves marching
to the beat of a different clock. The results -- of which
the least were the suicides jumping from the Lloyds
building -- had proven a ghastly point: but one that the
politicians did not understand. Or at least, not
profoundly enough to budget for the consequences.

"I should like to stress that this holocaust of our own
making is nothing less than a matter of complacency," the
Professor continued. "Once we quantised time, we tied our
work to the clock; and now that the work is automated, so
is the ticking. We are a short-sighted species. That
there was a quarter of a trillion lines of bad software
out there seven years ago is no surprise. That such a
quantity has been halved to date is good news, but not
quite adequate. We have, in a very real way, invented our
own end of history: a software apocalypse that in the day
ahead will engulf banks, businesses, government agencies,
and anyone who runs a large, monolithic, database that is
more than perhaps ten years old. Let us hope for the
future that the consequences are not too serious -- and
that the lesson will be learned for good by those who for
so long have ignored us."

Polite applause, then louder: a groundswell of clapping
as the ship gently pushed its way through the waves.

I began to push my chair back; it was close and hot, and
I felt slightly queasy. A hand descended on my wrist:
"remember what I said earlier," hissed Rita.

"What are you -" I saw her expression. Being the object
of such ferocity made me feel as if we had not gone our
separate ways. (And what if, in the weeks of confusion
after the Sizewell incident -- ten miles from the hotel I
had been staying in while doing my contract work -- I had
not visited the vasectomy clinic? What if my morbid fear
over fission products, that had in turn caused our own
atomic split, never quite reached such a pitch? Would we
still be together, a nuclear family with glow-in-the-dark
children?) "What do you care? I'm no use to you, am I?"

Her expression was unreadable as she let go of my arm.
"What use is any of this? We're sailing on the
Titanic, only the disaster starts when we go back to
harbour. Don't spoil my cruise for me, Marcus, or you'll
be sorry. I'll throw all your luggage overboard."

I nearly laughed, but instead I stood up and staggered
slightly as I headed back to the bar. How like Rita; the
paranoid over-reaction, fear of shadows, utilitarian
approach to people around her ... I began to wonder how
much I hated myself to have put up with her for so long,
and not to have found anyone better.

I was into my second gin and tonic when Clive appeared.
"Been in a car wreck?" he asked sympathetically.

"Rita," I said morosely.

"Oh." He was quiet for a minute. I heard faint applause
from the dining room. The steward at the bar turned his
back to us and polished the brasswork.

"Try one of these," he suggested, offering something that
looked a bit like a handmake lump of chocolate. "It's the
only way to see in such a fuck-up; totally stoned, drunk
as a skunk, and happy with it."

I palmed the sticky lump and swallowed. There was a
sweet, herbal taste under the chocolate that nearly made
me gag. Not my favourite way to take the stuff, but
better than nothing. (And Rita didn't approve, even of
something as mild as marijhuana: which somehow made it
more daring, more essential ...)

"Any more?" I asked, but he shook his head.

"Strong stuff. Got to have enough to go round," he added
with a curious smile. I could see he'd been at it
himself, then. "Settles the stomach, too."

I drained my glass, winced slightly, then walked over to
the bar for a refil. The barman didn't bother with an
optic, just poured in the gin and topped it off by eye.
"Will that be all, sir?" he asked.

"I'd like one for my friend," I said. Another glass
appeared as if by magic. All drinks were on the house,
this night if no other. "Thanks." I returned to the
table, where Clive was tapping his fingers idly.

"Let's go on deck," he suggested. I tried to dissuade him
but he was adamant: "it's fresh up there but the rain
stopped and the cloud's clearing. Let's chill out, okay?"

"If you must," I said. He stood up and lurched slightly
as he headed for the door. I followed him, expecting a
chill of damp air to rush in. Instead, I found that he
was right; the overcast had lifted and stars twinkled
high in a deep black vault. There was a slow breeze
blowing from ahead, and it was no cooler now than it had
been during the day.

"What do you expect to find when you go back?" asked
Clive.

"Everything. Nothing." In the distance, a monstrously
deep horn sounded a bass note; ships passing in the
night, I supposed. "I can't quite bring myself to believe
in the apocalypse. End of civilization as we know it.
Construction of cyberspace, the usual nonsense; it's
bollocks. We'll go back and find lots of database
programs have fallen over and there've been some really
major cock-ups, maybe even a local stock exchange or two,
but life goes on."

"That's one view," Clive said morosely.

"What do you expect?"

"The end of the world." He leaned out across the railing,
staring into the dark water beyond and below us. "Nobody
expects things to continue, not really. Everybody wants a
day of judgement, right? An end to the mortal coil. Pot
of gold at the end of the information superhighway."
Another, even deeper, horn sounded in the distance.
"We've designed for obsolescence for so long that it
wouldn't surprise me if the whole pack of cards tumbles
down. A bit like the fundies, who believe that it doesn't
matter how we run the world because they're all going
a-flying up to heaven in a couple of years anyway. The
rapture, they call it. Every city in the west is maybe
twenty four hours away from chaos and civil war -- that's
all the supplies they store locally, you know that? All
it takes is enough cracks in the fabric ..."

I wanted to tell him he was sounding like an
old-fashioned fundamentalist preacher but the words
caught in my throat: at that moment an almost palpable
wave of cold washed over me, as if the air around me had
turned to seawater. A great distant moaning wail of a
horn shuddered out beneath the moonless sky, so deep and
loud that I felt my stomach relax and contract with its
passage; a chilly sweat prickled across my forehead for a
moment, and I felt brushed by the ghostly fingertips of
drowned sailors.

"What's that?" I demanded.

"Tanker, probably," said Clive. "Really close, too --"

A smell like smouldering insulation made my nostrils
twitch: " too close!" We were near the front of
the ship, on the right hand side: I wondered if we should
head for the back, or if someone on the bridge would be
able to see whatever we were bearing down on. Burning
insulation and a rancid undertone of sulphur, of reeking
burnt meat, of something revolting and sweet at the same
time; a dim red light loomed on the horizon. The ship
rolled beneath my feet and I felt light-headed.

"Look, over there." I followed Clive's outstretched arm.
"What's happening?"

Whatever it was, it bulked out of the darkness like a
congealing fog bank, lit from within by a red glow. That
dreadful horn sounded again, rattling my innards, and
there was a faint echo from behind -- as if its distant
partner sounded a desolate mating chorus from across the
empty sea. Stars burned like halogen lights in the vast
darkness overhead. One by one they began to fall, tracing
bright lines across the sky until they faded out in the
distance. I looked towards the rear of the ship, back the
way we'd come; a false dawn bulked green on the horizon.
"I don't like this," I said, clutching the railing with
fingertips that felt like dry bones. "I'm too stoned."

"I'm not." Clive looked distracted, as if he was
listening to something. "What ... did you ever wonder,
what it would be like if the godbotherers were really
right all along? If maybe their revelation was the truth,
and it was all going to happen -- only they'd been out by
a couple of thousand years?"

"Can't happen." My teeth were chattering. "No rapture. No
singularity. It's just the way we think. We humans, we
want to lose our problems in some future end of all
worries. Natural tendency."

"Overruns," Clive muttered. "Schedule slippage. They got
all geared up at the turn of the first millennium, then
the apocalypse was cancelled. Now they've got it all over
again. What if they held the end of the world but nobody
came?"

Something dark bubbled up from the sea behind us. A deep
bass rumble, like a cross between an earthquake and a
sousaphone: the angular mass foamed the sea around,
gathering shrapnel and wreckage together into the dark
shape of an ancient submarine. Hakenkreutz half-rusted
into the shadowy conning-tower, it ghosted through the
waves towards the glow on the horizon, its charred and
skeletal crew staring incuriously at us as it cruised
past. Red and green afterimages rippled across the sea,
across everything I looked at except the dial of my
borrowed watch.

I shuddered in the grip of a dread so intense that my
heart lurched towards pure panic. "Don't!" Clive began to
walk forwards, along the curve of the deck towards the
front of the ship -- "where are you going?"

"What if they held the end of the world, but we were all
aboard the ship of fools and unbelievers?" he called over
his shoulder: "I'm joining them!"

A seventh rumbling note cut through the night, so deep
that I could barely hear it but only felt it in my bones.
I turned and staggered back towards the door, back
towards the warmth and safety of the bar and the dining
room. Behind me, Clive called: "don't leave me behind!"

The door slammed behind me. I looked around; the
bartender glanced up from polishing the bar and raised an
eyebrow.

"Give me a drink," I gasped. "Something strong."

"Bad night?" he asked casually. "You look like you've
seen a ghost."

I shuddered convulsively and took the tumbler, threw it
at the back of my throat. "In a manner of speaking."

"Happens," he said, matter-of-factly. "Lots of funny
things happen at sea. I could tell you some tales, I
could."

"Please don't. I've had enough of them for one night."

He looked away as I drained my glass.

"This isn't a good cruise," I said, trying to
communicate. "You know what? You know why we booked it?"

"Then, if you'll pardon my French sir, wasn't it a bit
stupid of you to come along for the ride?"

I headed for the inner corridor, meaning to check the
roll of dirty socks in my luggage. "I'm not really sure
..."

So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with
fierce energy a shared phantasy which, though delusional,
yet brought them such intense emotional relief that they
could live only through it, and were perfectly willing both
to kill and to die for it. This phenomenon was to recur many
times, in various parts of western and Central Europe ...

--The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn

Over the horizon, without any fuss, all the mainframes were
quietly going down.